Chip makers form Linaro to improve Linux hardware disties

Manufacturers chip in together to build a foundation

IBM, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments have chipped together to launch Linaro - a new software engineering foundation dedicated to improving Linux distributions, used in consumer devices.

The new not-for-profit venture by the chip makers is said to try and take the success Linux has seen in large enterprise software and give it a more mainstream twist by helping it to break into the TV, tablets, smartphones and netbooks market which are currently dominated by Windows, Symbian, Blackberry and Apple's iPhone operating system.

It is hoped these open source projects can then be used by Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS.

Tom Lantzsch, interim CEO of Linaro and an executive vice president at Arm Holdings said at Computex that the Foundation, which has also been joined by Arm, Freescale Semiconductor and ST-Ericsson will throw "tens of millions of dollars" per year at the venture.

He said in a statement: "The dramatic growth of open source software development can now be seen in internet-based, always-connected mobile and consumer products.

"Linaro will help accelerate this trend further by increasing investment on key open source projects and providing industry alignment with the community to deliver the best Linux-based products for the benefit of the consumer."

As well as the money the six companies will also join forces and share their open source engineering resources as well as contribute to a wide range of open source projects. The 20 engineers working on the project will also create developer tools for Linux makers so they can take better advantage of the complex chips made by the founding members of the group, mainly chips with Arm processing cores.

And it seems they are already on their way, with the group already announcing a project that is already in place is for fast boot kernel technology, so Linux distributions start up faster on devices.

I hope Linaro is more than keeping beat with the latest open sauce hardware software to ARM distributions.

Tools and Apps, infrastructure and frameworks to exploit to markets faster; an ARMy of App intensive spur for SPEAr ARM in ARM. phalanx to handle any sitcom whatever the RISCs.

I hope Linaro provides underlying functionality & protocols beyond JAVA/C for say: realtime synchronisations within a cloud for conducting a large symphony orchestra, etc., via music display and monitoring devices, replacing sheet music arrangements and the composition tasks, conductors, metronomes, audio engineering mics, feedback, adhoc alterations, etc..: To follow the bouncing ball about the behavior of chaotic systems - a framework where the protocol infrastructure and functionality is provided by Linaro. Linaro would be suite to do OCR and NLP of programme content to supplement in addition to TAG data for inputs into a multitude of Search and Application share potential.Linaro should also provide an exhaustive array of statistical measuring capabilities and SDBMS.Security as well; the last of note to leave, should off the lights.

Maestro, I believe you have my sauce open? Once more from the top, please, 1..2..1.2.3.4.